Yesterday at 8:30 a.m. President Trump tweeted, “I am pleased to inform you that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the air and on his way back from North Korea with the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting. They seem to be in good health. Also, good meeting with Kim Jong Un.”

The three American prisoners are now free men and the United States and North Korea move yet closer to making real progress down the road to denuclearization of Kim Jong Un’s enigmatic country.

Of course prisoners have been released from North Korea in past years so it is fair to ask what makes this time different. On Boston Herald Radio, Harry J. Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, explained that it comes down to money. “The maximum pressure campaign … is really strangling the North Korean economy. It’s actually so bad that the North Koreans could run out of foreign exchange reserves by either October or the end of the year,” Kazianis said. “What essentially that means is North Korea will be bankrupt and you can’t really feed your people and you can’t build a lot of ICBMs or nuclear weapons if you’re broke.”

The “maximum pressure” campaign is not an entirely new concept. As Kazianis said, “The maximum pressure campaign is a rehash — with 21st century characteristics — of the policy we used to defeat the old Soviet Union, what we use to call containment. It involves a mix of diplomatic, economic and military pressure to compel nations like North Korea and now Iran to change course. What we are saying to these bad actors is simple: If you want to be a rogue regime — build weapons of mass destruction and spread chaos — you will pay a price for it.”

The Trump administration’s commitment to the “maximum pressure” campaign in regards to North Korea has been a key to the success we are seeing. Among other things, it has resulted in effective sanctions against North Korea from their biggest and most crucial trading partner, China.

In addition, the United States has coordinated a worldwide effort to squeeze the regime with sanctions, focusing on its energy trade partners. North Korean coal cannot be purchased by the United Nation’s member states and harsh limits have been put on the volume of crude oil Kim can import.

The Trump administration has also taken aim at firms that conduct illicit trade with the North Korean regime, and fuel sanctions have resulted in skyrocketing gas prices for Pyongyang, which has had to deeply restrict military exercises and maneuvers as a result.

We’ll see where talks go between the two leaders, but we should be pleased that the president has stuck to his guns and brought us to this point.